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HP kit gives 8Gb/sec FC a boost

HP'S STORAGEWORKS 8Gb Simple SAN Connection Kit is the first 8Gb/sec Fibre Channel (FC) SAN aimed at remote offices and small- and medium-sized businesses. The FC SAN can support up to four hosts and, if you don't add in the cost of the storage, pricing comes to a little more than $1,000 a port. "A fairly aggressive price considering the newness of the [8Gb/sec FC] technology," says Greg Schulz, founder and senior analyst at StorageIO Group, Stillwater, MN. For $8,199, you receive an 8/20q FC Switch (eight ports enabled; upgradeable to 12, 16 or 20 ports), Simple SAN Connection Manager software, four PCI-e FC host bus adapters (HBAs), cables, 10 8Gb/sec Short Wave SFP+ optical transceivers for the HBAs, and wizard-driven software to install/manage the SAN and to provision the array. But don't expect 8Gb/sec throughput from the switch to storage. HP's Simple SAN Connection Kit only works with its 4Gb/sec Enterprise Virtual Arrays (EVAs) and 2Gb/sec and 4Gb/sec Modular Smart Arrays (MSAs), which means self-configuring ports must ...

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Organizations of all sizes have adopted iSCSI because it's easy to install, inexpensive, behaves just like Ethernet and doesn't require specialized skill sets like Fibre Channel does. But do analyst claims that iSCSI performance falls short of that for Fiber Channel hold up?

Today's application continuity computing (ACC) products are best suited for small- and medium-sized businesses, and are focused exclusively on Exchange, which most companies now consider a business-critical application. But the concentration on Exchange will likely change over the next few years, as several ACC vendors plan support for SQL Server and SharePoint in the future.

Clustered storage combines multiple arrays or controllers to increase their performance, capacity or reliability. But the technology isn't right for every company. We outline what you need to know before deciding to adopt clustered storage.

No "big name" vendor has yet won the top spot in our Diogenes Labs-Storage magazine Quality Awards for midrange arrays. This year, two relative newcomers--Compellent and EqualLogic--topped the field of competitors.

Thin provisioning is a promising way to address allocation and performance. One of the biggest challenges when using the technology is knowing where your data lives, and whether it can be tracked or recovered if there's a catastrophic component failure.